Love your topic title Zizzle and it was great to meet both you and Foz. There's no pic of you though Zizzle!. (That's my neighbour Polly on the right in the top photo who's always willing to lighten my fridge.) Transport is definitely the go next time as by then, bewtween us all, we should have a few beers to sample.
I could only offer the guys one AG to taste so commercials and some of Foz's ginger beer had to pack out the rest of the brew day, mainly for me.
All went smoothly enough (at least while Foz and Zizzle were here!) although had to use a bit of guesswork on the evaporation rate of the new Robinox. Ended up with 24.5 litres at 1040 so will fix this up next time.
Would have liked to have written out a nice clear brew sheet (and will do that for you two in the next few days) but ran out of prep time. This is Ross and Steve's fault. Ross, totally against my will, forced me to sample several of his beers when I dropped in to pick up some hops and refractometer on Saturday so didn't get home until 8pm.
Then Steve (above) rang 12 hours into his brew day for a little chat. I reckon he did what I did and had his first beer at mash in! LOL Steve! Steve was the kind provider of a detailed recipe for this AG. Many thanks to you again mate and I actually will send you a beer!
For me, the day started at 4:30am as I had a lot of things to do before the guys arrived. We mashed in at 11am and started chilling at 2:45pm. Foz and Zizzle had to go a little after this which left Polly and myself to finish the brew - a dangerous combination! My posts on AHB from about 6pm on Sunday will reveal the lack of skill and responsibility left to get the wort into the fermenter. Got it in somehow but yesterday morning I awoke to find a bloody great O-ring on my prep 'table'. This, of course, should have been in the fermenter lid - whoops!
Was also worried (and still am) about my yeast. I stupidly put a sachet into my keg fridge with the hops the night before. I forgot about the fridge cycling down to -6 degrees. Just took a refractometer reading then (too easy!) and it's dropped a smidgeon so here's hoping.
I'm not sure if this has ever been done before or is even allowed but on my next brew day, I think I'llhave my first beer after flame out. I'm sure that this would cut about 5 hours between flame off and getting the beer into the fermenter which could prove to be a real breakthrough in craftbrew methodology.
Think I better go and do some work. Certainly feeling a lot more energetic than I was yesterday!
And Foz and Zizzle, you'll have to drop in in a few weeks to taste the fruits of our labours.
Cheers
Pat
EDIT: Hopefully Zizzle is going to post about his crafty way of maintaining temperature control using his computer. Zizzle is a computer genius!
